Tech providers finally focusing on long-neglected drayage transport

Despite having long been a pain point for the liner shipping industry, the technology behind drayage procurement and execution has largely been neglected due to a highly fragmented market and its relatively low cost in comparison with other modes.

The management of drayage procurement and execution has long been a thorn in the side of the liner shipping industry.
A couple factors have driven this evergreen pain point: the fragmented nature of drayage operations in the various port complexes in North America and the lack of standardized technology aimed specifically at this leg of container transportation.
In American Shipper research initiatives, drayage is often cited as one of the single biggest black holes for shipment information. That lack of available data extends from in-transit visibility to driver availability to accurate billing details.

Bigger Fish. While there have been a handful of solutions aimed at helping shippers, carriers, and non-vessel-operators (NVOs) better manage this critical ocean-to-distribution-center link in the logistics chain that have emerged over the years, very few have actually been successful.
Often, these solutions are constrained geographically, helping users to manage drayage operations in a single region, but not on a nationwide basis. In other instances, the solutions have been too discrete, aimed at specific processes like container pickup appointment scheduling.
Most likely, there has been little focus on specific technology solutions surrounding the drayage leg because the relatively low cost of drayage offsets the lack of visibility or other problem areas. Put more simply, there are always bigger fish to fry.

Most likely, there has
been little focus
on specific technology
solutions surrounding
the drayage leg because
the relatively low cost
of drayage offsets
the lack of visibility
or other
problem areas.

Among the established providers of drayage technology, New Jersey-based IMS Transport Solutions is likely the best known and most widely used. The two-decades-old company this year rebranded itself into two separate divisions: a brokerage division that lets shippers manage drayage rates in the United States and Canada and track those loads, and a logistics management division that provides a technology solution that enables visibility all the way upstream to purchase order management and execution of the drayage move at destination.
There is also DrayMaster, a provider of drayage technology solutions (predominantly procurement and rate management) to trucking companies, freight forwarders, and brokers through an application programming interface-based platform.
A more recent entrant into the drayage technology market is BookYourCargo, also based in New Jersey.
Thomas Abramowitz, senior sales and marketing manager for the company, told American Shipper BookYourCargo was born out of the drayage provider JSK Transportation, after the latter realized its technology had value beyond its ability to service JSK’s own customers.
“We had developed a really good service based on our core proprietary technology, but we were only using that platform internally for our customers,” he said in a recent interview.
Two years ago, JSK began to build out a public-facing version of its platform that could be used independently, whether the user was a customer or not. That became BookYourCargo, now the brand name for all of the company’s services.
The cloud-based system is highly configurable, but in essence, it is designed to help companies instantly procure drayage rates, whether from the customer’s own network of providers or via BookYourCargo’s own roster of capacity; dispatch and track loads and empties from gate-out to gate-in; make warehousing appointments; as well as with proof of delivery and invoicing.
Abramowitz said the system also scrubs terminal data to alert the shipper when its container is available, among other customizable options.

MTS Model. There are two points of entry for BookYourCargo’s sales teams.
“We can be your drayage provider, where we perform the move for you,” said Abramowitz. “In the other model, you negotiate your rates, and then send those rates to our system via API, EDI, or Excel. Instead of paying us for drayage, you just pay us a handling fee.”
Abramowitz says that in the second model, BookYourCargo essentially acts as a shipper’s “dispatch services arm.”
“Instead of one system for drayage providers in Houston and another for Oakland, you have one standardized system,” he said.
If the model sounds familiar, that’s because it’s quite common in other over-the-road freight modes, where it’s often called managed transportation, or managed transportation services (MTS).
While many MTS providers help shippers with drayage as part of a multimodal transportation arrangement, that management is often about fitting a square peg—i.e. drayage—into a round hole—i.e. a system designed to optimize the truckload and less-than-truckload modes.That’s not a slight on those MTS providers or the systems they use. Even best-in-class visibility tools have suffered from a lack of standardized and available drayage data.
It’s that niche that IMS over the past two decades and, more recently, BookYourCargo are attempting to address.
The technology is clearly serving a need in the drayage rate management and visibility market for shippers and logistics service providers (LSPs) seeking a single solution across drayage providers and regions.
BookYourCargo’s impressive list of customers includes Samsung, Sony, Costco Wholesale, Dollar Tree, Pep Boys, Allied Global Logistics, Atlantic Pacific Lines, Mallory Alexander, and MAC Container Line, among others. The company also provides drayage services for a number of ocean carriers, and is the sole drayage provider to the Bochasanwasi Akshar Purushottam Sanstha (BAPS) Hindu temple complex in central New Jersey, a massive decade-long construction project using Italian marble, limestone from Bulgaria, and Indian sandstone, all imported through the Port of New York and New Jersey (see “A spiritual supply chain,” pg. 20-21).
Drayage has become a more scrutinized area of logistics management in recent years for a couple key reasons. One is that there is pressure on supply chains to become more responsive to their end consumers, which means goods have to move more quickly and efficiently across all modes. But just as importantly, shippers need more real-time data about in-transit goods to convey to the buyers of those products, or to internal departments that manage inventory and purchasing.
There are also dynamics within the drayage industry that make it much more difficult to manage. Much of the industry is composed of independent owner-operators that have little access to, or interest in, visibility technology. Further in the background are legislative efforts in some states to classify drayage drivers as employees, as opposed to independent contractors, and the electronic logging device (ELD) mandate that makes it all but impossible for truckers to skirt existing hours-of-service regulations, thus squeezing the amount of time drayage drivers can operate.
All this could potentially put further pressure on drayage capacity, making it even more urgent for beneficial cargo owners and their service providers to obtain tools that help manage capacity and in-transit cargo more effectively.